It’s around five-thirty when I clock out. Mike is protesting outside the clinic again. He’s got this hand-written placard that says something about a big baby-killing conspiracy. He thinks I’m the ringleader. Every time a car blasts past, he waves his arms all about. He starts screaming as soon as he spots me stepping outside. He does this three, maybe four times a week. I don’t know how he does it, cares so much.
I started working at the East Side Family Planning Clinic five years ago, only a few months after the school district canned me. I just shine the shitter and mop the floors—that’s my whole job. But you wouldn’t know it from the way Mike talks about me. He’s had it out for me ever since I slapped his phone from his hand while he filmed a young lady, just a girl really, leaving the clinic.
Every chance he gets, he films me and posts the video on his Facebook. When I leave work, he tails me, telling all his followers that I am the mastermind behind this big industrial-scale baby-killing operation. If you watched his videos, you’d think I rip the babies out with my bare hands. I have no clue what’s happened in his life, what’s gutted him so deeply that he needs to bust my balls, but you’d think I swing the babies around by their little limbs.
Dealing with Mike takes composure, so I pause in the doorway and wait a moment. A little sliver of air conditioning crawls up my back. I step into the humidity. Over on the corner, Mike stands tall on his toes. He goes by PatriotVeteran1492 online. Last year, I found his real name—Mike—on Google, and it riles him up. He’s a real hot head, always throwing his arms up and screaming himself hoarse. “Mike,” I sometimes yell, and it’s like clockwork, the way he melts down and sputters everywhere, spitting all over the sidewalk.
I look back at the clinic. It isn’t much, a big grey crate that could have been airlifted in from Russia or any other place with big grey crates for buildings. The windows are tinted black, and the sign says East Side Family Planning. All that’s to say, there’s nothing special about the clinic. But the way Mike glares at it wildly, you’d think he unearthed a mass grave right here in town.
I hear the door open behind me and look back. It’s the security guard, Ed. He’s standing sideways in the doorway, staring past me. He’s got his eyes fixed on Mike. His arms are crossed, his face all stern. “You want me to escort you to the car, Phil?” he says.
“No, Ed,” I tell him. I’m tired, and my voice is all throat today. “I can handle it. Thanks, though.”
My pickup is parked in the lot across the street. I have to pass Mike to get to it. I start making my way, but then I notice an image of my face printed on his t-shirt, all bunched up and wrinkled.
My wife is nearby. She died five years back, but I can feel her presence. “That’s a terrible photo of you, Phil,” she whispers in my ear. She used to be real sweet, but ever since she passed, it seems like all we do is argue. She flits around behind me and puts me down. A real piece of work. I tell her I love her. I try to remind her of how happy we were together. She won’t hear any of it, but I keep at it, trying to win her back.
“Tammy, doll,” I say. “You don’t have to say stuff like that. I already know you’re out of my league.”
Mike smiles a big smile as I walk up. It’s July, and the sun has done a real number on him. His face is all red. He’s drenched in sweat. Right beneath my face, in big block letters, his shirt says: Phillip Turp Kills Babies All Day and Night. He’s got my name spelled wrong, and there are so many words they hardly fit.
Summers burn cruel here. Nowadays Tammy calls me a sweaty pig, but she was singing a different tune when she was still alive. She used to say the heat taught us to appreciate the little morsels of relief. She meant a small breeze, a spurt of AC, a patch of shade under a Sycamore. She said it just like that: morsels. She went wild for words like that. The first few months after she died, she didn’t appear much. I used to whisper her words. Crying, I’d wander the aisles of Kroger’s muttering morsels, kernels. At home on the couch, watching a ballgame on TV, I’d catch myself saying itty bitties.
I stop in front of Mike and palm a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes. One falls out in my hand and I fire it up, my first smoke since lunch. I blow a lungful at Mike and smile through the clouds of smoke. He puffs his chest. I spent the whole day crawling up under the clinic beds to clean them, and my back throbs something awful. Sunlight snaps off car mirrors and damn near blinds me. The ammonia soaked into my skin rolls my stomach. But Mike doesn’t seem to notice any of it. He just keeps swinging his placard.
I take a closer look. It says, Phil Turp: Baby Executioner.
**
Tammy was brought up south of Waco in Walnut Estates Trailer Community, a fifteen-unit lot crammed with doublewides, thick chickweeds, and trash mounds. We met in a buffet line at Luby’s. She asked if I was planning on taking all the mashed potatoes for myself. We hit it off right away. She was twenty-one, four years younger than me, but we didn’t care. She had just graduated from Waco Community College with a two-year degree, and I was a summer semester away from finishing a physical education degree that mowing lawns had paid for. We would stay up in bed all night, Tammy and me, waiting for the sun to reach through the blinds. We would plot plans to move far away and raise a crop of Little League all-stars. The doctor had told me a few years earlier that my swimmers were no good, but I never let on—those days I was still clinging onto a morsel of hope.
Her old man had served in Nam. After he married and had Tammy, he busted his ass in a garage seven days a week, banging a wrench on rusted-out motors, patching tires, all that. Her mom passed the days clipping coupons and screaming at the unemployment office on the phone.
An eighteen-wheeler had ripped off my mom’s and dad’s heads when I was sixteen, and I was still wading in the grief that welled up inside me. I ran through a twelve-pack of Bud Ice a night, and sometimes I tossed in half a bottle of Wild Turkey. Once every couple weeks, I staggered home from the bar with gnarled knuckles and black eyes, my shirt slit to shreds. No matter what mess I made, Tammy and her parents treated me like family. You hear about that kind of love—you just don’t imagine you’ll ever find it.
We tied the knot in her backyard. It was a small ceremony. Her mom had strung up Christmas Lights on the chain-link fence behind the trailer. Tammy and I swayed side to side, slow dancing, and then we all plopped down in lawn chairs. Her cousin Earl, who lived three trailers down, stood up in front of us. He wore a clip-on tie and delivered the toast with a can of Miller High Life. Fireflies lit up around us. Everyone cried, even me. Her mom and dad and cousin all slapped me on the shoulder and cracked big smiles. You’d have thought we were hauling off for Hollywood. Tammy’s old man took me aside and clamped a coarse hand on my collarbone. “I know you’ll do right by her,” he said.
“Thank you,” I told him, and I meant it because you don’t forget a moment like that.
The next morning, Tammy and I loaded the few items we owned into my pickup: a big beer box full of Tammy’s old romance paperbacks, a few garbage sacks stuffed with shirts and shoes, and an Igloo keeping cool a twelver of Bud Ice for the road. I splashed Wild Turkey into a Diet Coke can, cranked the engine, and we pushed north to Plano, our hearts full of a hope I had never before known.
I had lined up a good gig at Armstrong Middle School, teaching physical ed to the handicapped kids and coaching the seventh-grade basketball squad. We had a new house a few blocks away from the school. The work paid well, dental and all, and the district dished out an extra stipend because I also helped out with the ninth-grade football team at the high school down the road.
Those first few years, it felt like all the pieces had fallen into place. When the last bell of the school day screamed, students streamed into the hallways. I shared an office with the swim coach, a fat man named Bill Ringer. I’d kick up my feet, and he’d have his fat hand in a bag of Doritos. “Phil,” he’d sometimes say. “It’s not a bad life, is it?”
I had photos of Tammy on my desk, and I’d run my fingers across her face, asking the Lord how I landed on his good side. “It’s not a bad life, Bill,” I’d say. “Not at all.”
I knew I couldn’t just take it all for granted, so on Wednesdays I ran the prayer group for the athletes at school. The kids would pile into someone’s living room, putting on the waterworks and telling us all how the Lord climbed into their hearts. We called the meetings Athletes for Christ. When I told Tammy about our first session, tears came to her eyes and she said, “I can’t handle all that sweetness, Phil. It’s just too adorable. Their itty-bitty hearts.”
She could get sentimental like that, but who could blame her? I would watch the students recount their redemptions, every last detail of accepting Christ, and try to understand what was happening in their hearts. But that was a dream I woke up from before I could ever wrap my head around it.
**
“There he is, ladies and gents,” Mike says. He has his phone camera running. “Say hello to Mr. Phil Turp.”
I guess he’s forty, forty-one. His red beard is unruly and looks like a burning jungle on his face. His eyes are big and wide, like a bug’s. His arms run long and stringy. The sun had burned his skin hard and leathery. He gets my name wrong every time—it’s Tarp—but I damn sure won’t be the one to correct him.
“There he is indeed,” Mike keeps at it. “The world’s leading baby rapist, Mr. Phil Turp.”
I bite on the filter of my Lucky Strike. “Still smoking, huh,” Tammy says.
“Babe,” I tell her. “I know, I know. I promised to quit. And I will,” I say. “I’ll quit smoking if it gets you back to me.”
“You are crazy as hell, aren’t you, baby killer?” Mike says.
“Hold on a second here, Mike,” I say.
“Don’t call me that. You don’t know my real name. Trust me. You don’t know shit about me. Not a damn thing.”
“Well, what am I meant to call you, Mike?”
“PatriotVeteran1492, Turp. That’s all you need to know.”
“OK, Mike.” I know I’m asking for it, but sometimes I can’t help it. Working in the clinic, all you see are women sobbing, their men pacing around the waiting room. “Sorry, PatriotVeteran1492. Listen now, you’ve got me confused. In your mind, what is it I do to these babies, exactly?”
“Rape and kill,” he shouts. He shoves his phone in my face. I guess my face is all over his Facebook again. “You do both.”
I start toward the intersection, but Mike won’t let up. He stamps alongside me.
“You are both. A rapist and a murderer. Both of them, you hear?”
“I hear you, alright.”
The crosswalk flashes green in the shape of a mother walking a kid across the street. I start footing it to the other side. The sun is a sledgehammer.
“You do both, you son of a bitch,” Mike says. “How do you intend to make right with the Lord when you finally croak?”
“S’pose the Lord will just have to understand that all I did was wipe a rag on a commode and push a mop.” His face burns red—you almost can’t tell where his beard ends and his cheeks start.
“Time to come clean, Phil,” he says.
We are now standing in the middle of the street, and he pushes the phone camera so close to my face that it nicks my nose. I ball my fists out of instinct—I’ve got a thing about personal space. I could crack his cheekbone, maybe bust his eyebrow. But I take a couple slow breaths and shake my fists loose. He just won’t give up.
“Get it all off your chest, Turp. How many baby rapes are you responsible for?”
A black Tahoe hums at the traffic light. The guy behind the wheel snaps a photo on his phone. My face flashes hot. He’s getting a real kick out of it, this guy in the Tahoe. I bet he thinks he’s real slick. He keeps laughing his head off at me. I bet he’s got himself a real nice wife back at home, maybe even a handful of kids running up and down the walls.
“Well, shit, Mike. Baby rapes, you say? I must’ve lost count.”
“Don’t talk to me. I don’t talk to the devil.”
“Wish I was the goddamned devil, Mike. I really do.”
This confuses Mike. He cocks his head sideways.
“I’ll tell you why, Mike. I can’t imagine the devil has to stomach anyone quite like you down there.”
Mike follows me to the blacktop rectangle where my pickup waits. Rust is eating away at the side panels, and the windows are lashed with scratches. I slide the key into the door and slip inside. The engine whines. Sometimes the battery cables come loose, but I’m getting tired. The last thing I want to do is go under the engine while Mike is hollering and filming me.
I try again and again, and the motor finally grinds to life. Mike walks alongside the pickup as I reverse. He puts his face so close it may as well be mashed to the glass. We meet eyes, and I see the red cracks across his. The AC coughs up hot air, but I leave the window rolled up. I throw it in drive and the pickup jumps as I slam my heel down on the gas. Mike gives chase in the rearview mirror. He waves an arm wildly. With the other, he’s holding up his phone, filming me.
Tammy’s back in my ear—her breath blows hot on my neck. “You dumbass,” she says. “He’s got the license plate and all. He’s going to find the home one day.”
“Don’t you worry about that. I won’t let anyone hurt you, babe. You’re always safe with me.”
I cut right on Fifteenth and Mike falls out of my rearview. I start thinking about the Bud Ice in the fridge of home. There’s a can of chili in the cupboard, too. Then my mind hurtles each way. I think, That son of a bitch in the Tahoe must have real good air conditioning. I think, That son of a bitch, I bet he’s got a woman who loves him. And then I’m thinking, how am I going to get right with the Lord?
“I don’t know,” I hear myself say. When I reach my neighborhood, a couple of boarded-up homes coast by. A crow lands on a phone line. Trash blows around in little cyclones. A broken toy sits in the street, but I don’t see any kids around. “I just don’t know,” I hear myself say.
**
The first spring after we married, Tammy and I spent almost every weekend holed up in the house. We couldn’t get enough of each other. We’d hold each other, our bodies glossed in sweat. We’d listen to mockingbirds sing. “You know mockingbirds can make just about any sound?” Tammy would say.
“Oh, yeah?”
“Those itty-bitty birds can mimic anything. You name it. They can creak like door hinges or bark like dogs.”
And we tried for our first kid—sometimes two or three times a day. We lay tangled in bed for hours, trying and trying. Part of me knew the day would come, but I thought it was a long way off. I put on a real show, even kicked Wild Turkey for a couple months.
It was after our first visit to the fertility doctor. Tammy sat at the dining room table. She clenched her fists. She rubbed her eyes raw. The look on her face when I came home that day could’ve sliced right through me. “How long’ve you known?”
I stammered. I scanned my mind for any excuse, but I hesitated for a moment too long. “Long time,” I said.
She fingered a strand of hair from her face and stared into a cup of coffee. “How long?” she said, but it didn’t matter anymore. You can bury a lie like that, but one day it will show up again, ready to follow you around for the rest of your life.
**
The grass reaches my knees, but I am too tired for lawn work. I shoulder through the front door and head to the fridge. The first swig of Bud Ice hits me in the chest. I drop down on the couch but can’t get comfortable. The house clicks and groans. My mind won’t rest.
For a while after Tammy died, I slept in the pickup. My whole body ached and I woke to stray dogs howling every night. But I didn’t know how to sleep inside, not without her.
After some time passed, I boarded up the bedroom door. I started coiling up on the couch each evening, the television playing all night. It didn’t help—the morning it started, Tammy hovered right through the bedroom door. “Morning, Phil,” she said. “What do you plan on fucking up today?”
I thought I was losing my mind, but she kept showing up, sometimes two or three times a day. I eventually took it as an opportunity, a chance to win back the woman I loved and lost.
“What’re you looking at?” Tammy says now.
I tilt the phone so she can see. “It’s Mike’s Facebook page,” I say. “He’s putting me on there just about every day now. It’s all baby killer this, baby killer that. Look here,” I tell her. I point at the number of people following Mike—five thousand. “These people get real worked up. I don’t know why Mike doesn’t bust someone else’s balls. The doctor. Maybe a nurse.”
“Well, it serves you right. You are a baby killer, kind of. Makes sense that thousands of people hate you.”
“Tammy, love. You don’t mean that.” I reach out for her shoulder, but she floats off quickly.
A few posts down, Mike has already put up the video from this afternoon. The text reads, ‘I Think I Lost Count’: Turp Admits to Murdering the Unborn. Nine hundred people have already liked it.
I toss my phone and watch it bounce off the far end of the couch. It hits the floor with a thud. I pop open a Bud Ice and light another Lucky Strike. Tammy leaves me alone with my thoughts, and I sit there for a long time. Smoke blooms and breaks apart. I am thinking, I know how I got here, but I just can’t figure out why I had to be the one to get here.
**
It was early fall, a little more than five years ago. I was out on the porch. Sweat slid down my chest. I had my hands planted on my hips. I had just finished the lawn, and Tammy had rearranged the garage. We had spent months circling around it, but we finally made amends. I even floated the idea of adoption, and Tammy was starting to come around.
Tammy brought me a glass of water. She came out with a tray of ice cubes and all. A smile spread across her face. She kissed my cheek, and I knew we had turned a corner. But then the color left her face. She hunched forward and rested her arms on her knees. She wheezed. “Can you develop asthma this late in life?” she said.
The doctor said the cancer would spread fast. He said she would experience fatigue. Those first couple months, though, she couldn’t sit still. She cleaned the kitchen twice a day. She disappeared into the attic for hours at a time. It was all nervous energy, but I mistook it for a sign of hope.
Kneeling next to the bed, she’d pray. “Please, Lord,” she’d say. “Please, Lord. Please, Lord.” And I understood it for the first time, how a desperate prayer could turn into a death wish, how the death wish could become just a prayer again.
Summer came, the grass yellowed, but it wasn’t what you’d hope. The heat couldn’t do anything for her. She started to writhe in bed. Her sweat came out cold. She whimpered in her sleep. When I cut the lawn, I could hear her moaning from inside, over the rumble of the mower’s motor.
Her lungs finally gave out in August, and her parents hauled up from Waco. After they lowered her into the earth, her old man pulled me off to the side. “I was right,” he said.
“Sir?”
“About you. You did right by her.”
I could’ve sworn I heard Tammy scoff somewhere behind me, but there was nothing there when I whipped around. I turned back to Tammy’s dad. “Thank you,” I said. I was three-quarters deep into a bottle of Wild Turkey, but even if you lived forever, you could never forget a moment like that.
**
I wake and drain a cup of coffee. The air conditioning only chokes out hot air, so I stand around in my Fruit of the Looms until it’s time to leave. I slip into my work pants and pause on the porch, looking at the abandoned houses across the street. Pigeon shit splatters on my pickup. A hot breeze wraps around me. I spark a Lucky Strike, and then smoke two more. I use electrical tape on the battery cables, and then set off for work.
I spend the whole shift mopping floors, rooting around in the storage closet, and rearranging supplies for no real reason. I douse the clinic beds with disinfectant. The chemicals make my nostrils burn. I tell Tammy about the way my chest felt tight when I first saw her. I tell her I loved her that first moment. She calls me scum. I tell her I’m sorry and reach to touch her cheek, but she dissolves.
Around one o’clock, the receptionist interrupts my lunch break. That’s okay—lunch today is three Lucky Strikes and a Dr. Pepper. “Coach,” the receptionist says. Her name’s Carla, and she’s called me that ever since I mistakenly mentioned I used to be a coach. I don’t have the heart to tell her how much it hurts. For ten years, I wiped slobber from the special ed students’ chins. I held the boys steady while they took a leak at the urinal. I wiped up the piss they sprayed on the floor.
“Coach,” Tammy says, laughing.
“I was a coach,” I tell Tammy.
“I know,” Carla says. She smiles sweetly. “That’s why I call you that.”
“Yeah. What can I do for you?”
“Coach, there’s not any chance you could cut the grass tomorrow, is there? The lawn care company dropped our account.”
I press my teeth into the filter of a Lucky Strike. Sweat soils my work shirt. Things could be worse. “Well,” I say. “S’pose I could.”
“Thank you, Coach. Really.”
“Sure,” I say.
**
I pull the mower from the storage building. The grass isn’t that tall. The problem is the perimeter of the lawn, the way it twists in sharp Z-patterns where the curb zigzags. They’ve also got these stone slabs spread out as a walkway across the lawn—a real nightmare to mow around. Tammy used to pull out a lawn chair and watch me mow our yard. “Excuse me, Mr. Lawn Boy,” she’d joke. “But you missed a spot over there.”
I’d tip the brim of my ball cap and say, “Sorry, ma’am,” and then give her a little wink.
Right now she’s following me and saying how bad a job I’m doing. “You fuckin’ this up, too?” she says.
Around the time I’m halfway done, Carla charges out of the clinic. She puckers her face, looking like she has something to tell me. She says there’s a phone call for me inside.
“Must be a mistake,” I tell her. I have no friends, don’t receive phone calls.
“No,” she says. “Not a mistake, Coach. It’s someone from the FBI.”
“Now I know you are pullin’ my leg.”
“I’m not, Coach. Really.”
I tell her to take a message, that I will return the call. Someone is trying to get a laugh at my expense, and I don’t have time for it. I mow until I finish up. I walk inside, wringing sweat from my shirt and toweling my face with a rag. There’s a phone number jotted on a slip of paper in my work station. I dial the number because I am curious, and a machine picks up—it really is the FBI.
“Carla,” I say. I’m back into the reception area. “I’ll have to weed eat tomorrow. My stomach’s in a bad way.”
On the way out I pause under the vent and let the cool air roll over me. “Little morsels of relief, huh?” Tammy says.
“Don’t even think about getting cute with me all the sudden,” I say. “I just don’t have time for it right now, Tammy. I really don’t.”
**
After the first DUI, the judge had granted me mercy, called me “a man bereaved.” Community service and a thousand-dollar fine. No jail time, no suspended license. “I lost my wife to cancer, Mr. Tarp,” he’d said. I thought he may’ve been crying. “I believe you are genuinely in need of a second chance.”
But by the time I swayed back into the courtroom a second time, my shirt still sopping with Wild Turkey, all that sympathy had dried up. The way he spit out my name, I thought he would hurl the gavel at me. “Three weeks, Mr. Tarp,” he said, banging the stand. “That was all it took for you to squander the opportunity I gave you.”
I did six weeks in county, playing cards with a guy who could only speak a few shaky phrases in English, all rehearsed. “I’m innocent man,” he would say, flipping his deck to show his hand. He took me for my breakfast rations—two stale donuts the guard dropped off at daybreak—and a few Lucky Strikes every day. For a while, I considered him my only friend in the world. It was only after I got out that I read a newspaper article about him—he’d run over a kid, left him there to die.
**
I cut the steering wheel and swing down my street, still thinking about the phone call. The tires squeal. The pickup skids into the gravel driveway, shooting pebbles onto the lawn.
“A threat,” the agent had told me. I pushed the receiver against my ear, thinking I misunderstood him.“A credible threat on your life.”
“Mike isn’t no threat,” I replied.
“Mike? You mean PatriotVeteran1492. His real name’s—”
“No, no. Don’t tell me. Listen—Mike’s just lost. Hell, we’re all lost. Most days I look around and don’t have the smallest idea where I am.”
The agent paused, and then cleared his throat. “Mr. Tarp, sir. I am talking about his followers online. I’m talking about guns. I’m talking about bombs.”
“Bombs? Officer—”
“Agent,” he corrected. “Surely you know abortion clinics have been bombed before, don’t you?”
“OK, Agent. Look now. Me, I’m just a janitor. I clean toilets. I use a plunger. I man the mop. Don’t anyone care that much about me.”
“Bombs, Mr. Tarp. These folks believe that lizard people are running the country. They believe in shadowy cabals. They think the government poisons the tap water and it’s turning the frogs gay. We’re not talking about logical people, Mr. Tarp.”
“Now, agent. You mean to tell me lizard people and gay frogs plan to do me harm?”
“Mr. Tarp, I mean to tell you there are people out there who do not see the world the way we do. People who could target you with violence, and they don’t respond to logic.”
“You hear yourself, don’t you? Logic, lieutenant.”
“Agen—” he started, but then gave up. He let out a raspy sigh. “OK, Mr. Tarp. As you like. You have my number when you need it.”
“I appreciate that, but I can’t see why I would,” I said. The line clicked dead.
Later that night, I’m sleeping on the couch when the noises start. First, a car screeches to a stop. Then, there’s a powerful series of bangs, loud like gunshots. “Tammy, hon,” I say. “I’m trying to sleep.”
A brick crashes through the window, shooting glass all over the hardwood floor. My heart races, but I reach for an old beer on the coffee table and take a slug. The TV is humming. I stand up and slip into my house shoes. Another brick comes through the window, where the glass used to be. Tires shriek outside. I choke down another mouthful of beer, all suds. I tiptoe to the window. Outside, the weeds are overrunning the lawn. The street is silent and slashed with shadows.
**
It was the last day of summer break, and I hailed a cab outside county jail. The cop who booked me must have siphoned the twenty from my billfold, and the taxi driver told me to eat shit before he sped away. The mailbox was spitting up coupon books, warning notices from the city—the grass was up to my hips. I’d left the windows open on the night I’d been pulled over, and a summer rainstorm left the whole place smelling like soggy socks.
The next morning, I walked to Armstrong Middle School because my pickup was still impounded. I shouldered through the office door and saw Bill Ringer looking up at me as if he was laying eyes on a dead man. Doritos crumbs clung to the corners of his lips. Someone had shined my desk, and my photos of Tammy had disappeared.“Trying to erase me from your life, are you?” Tammy said.
“Tammy,” I said. “I’d never. You’re all I have ever wanted.”
“Oh, Phil,” Bill said. He looked at me with what I guessed was sympathy. “They took the pictures and everything else away in a cardboard crate. Earlier this morning.”
“They took my shit?” I said.
“It’s in the administrative office,” Bill said. “I’m so sorry. I know you’ve had a hard go of it—”
“Best of luck, Bill,” I said, and slammed the door before he could tell me how much he pitied me.
The assistant principal shot to his feet when I elbowed into his office. He offered his hand but recoiled when he saw my face. My fists were balled tight, my knuckles flashing white. I should have slugged him in his mouth. I should have kneed his gut and spit on his skull when he keeled over. I should have taken a handful of his blonde hair and trawled him all the way up and down the hallways as the bell rang and the students swarmed out of their classrooms.
“Coach Tarp,” he started. “I know this is difficult, but surely you understand.”
I clenched my fists tighter and stepped toward him. But what good would it have been? I reached out, shook his hand, and said, “No hard feelings.”
Thirty-five and booted from the only real job I ever had. You can’t imagine how hard it is to find steady work when you’ve made a few mistakes. You can’t imagine how tough it is to eke out a living, how badly they want to keep punishing you when you already want to hoist up the white flag and swing it and swing it and swing until your goddamn arms give out.
“That’s it?” Tammy said. “That’s all you’ve got?”
**
I tug the ripcord and the weed eater fires up. I go to town on the edge of the sidewalk in front of the clinic. Little grass trimmings sprinkle the pavement. Cars whiz past and I watch them. The sun slams down on me. When I finish lining up the lawn, I grab the larger weeds by their roots, tearing them out by hand. Earth is streaked across my shirt. The grass smells as fresh as a graveyard.
I’m so focused that I almost don’t notice when Mike appears on the corner. He has his mobile in his hand, trained on me like a sidearm. Tammy clears her throat, but I stop her before she can start in on me.
“No more. Not one more word. None,” I say. “You’re not my wife anymore.”
“Your wife?” Mike says. He’s moving my way.
“Not now, Mike.”
“You’re crazy as hell. Tell me, Turp. What does your wife think of what you do?”
“Mike, please.” I can feel the blood hitting my brain.
“Is that why she left you? All the blood on your hands?”
Quick as a heartbeat I close the gap between us. Mike stumbles back, but I’m all over him. I open-palm him twice and scream, “Mike, Mike, Mike.”
Mike turns to run. I snatch his collar, twist it until a cough rattles his chest. He falls down, face first. The ragweed floating in the air hits me. My eyes burn, start watering. Mike stammers. It all comes out in fragments. “Rape … Babies … You …” he says. “How many … Help … Please … Stop … Please.”
The security guard, Ed, is in the front entryway to the clinic. Carla comes next. A nurse shows up behind her. The head doctor pushes to the front. For the first time, I notice a new banner strung up above the door: Your Safety Is Our Top Priority.
Tammy glides up next to me, but I shoot her the bird. “Get the fuck out of here,” I say. “And stay gone.”
Carla presses her palms to her cheeks and mouths something I can’t make out. The doctor hides his face behind a clipboard. “Mike, Mike,” I shout. I turn to the group in the entry. “What happened to this man?” I hear myself shout. Who can say why, but I need to know. “Who hurt this man?”
Tammy is flying off down the street in a flash, her body flickering so that I can hardly see her. She’s yelling something over her shoulder, but I can’t hear a word she’s saying, not anymore.
Mike, he’s still down there on the ground. I squeeze every muscle in my body, trying to stop my fists from coming down on him, but they’re anvils. Birds are barking, doors flinging open all across the neighborhood. Mike is saying through broken teeth, “We gotta get right with the Lord, Turp.” For the first time in years, everything is clear.
Patrick Strickland is a writer and journalist from Texas. His short stories have appeared in The Coachella Review, This Great Society, and MonkeyBicycle.
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